Saturday, 21 December 2013

There is a difference between journalists attempting to
explain why terrorists or assassins believe they are justified in
carrying out attacks and using those justifications as a means to rationalise them as a mere reflex action to foreign policies that are said to be bound to cause a response.

Essentially,
Milne's attitude towards to Adebolajo's assassination is to use
it to hammer home hard propaganda points by quoting the words of
terrorists and assassins as if their justifications were self evident
and not to be 'condoned' because 'counter-productive'.

This
Leninist approach to terrorism regards such violence as Adebolajo's as
bad because bad for 'the cause', an 'infantile disorder' to use Lenin's
words when criticising 'pointless' anarchist violence in Russia before
the Revolution of 1917 that fails to yield results.

Milne opines,

'Quite
apart from morality, the impact was violently counter-productive for
the Muslims that Rigby's killers claimed to be defending, as
Islamophobic attacks spiked across Britain.'

That
is why Milne loftily writes off morality as something 'quite apart' from
the 'counter-productive' nature of the attack. That, in any case,
matters less because a soldier who had served in Afghanistan was hacked
to death in the streets of London but because it led to a backlash
against 'our side'.

The use of language to hint and insinuate
that message is clear to anybody who knows anything about how propaganda
works. Milne is claiming that what assassins such as Adebolajo must be
taken at face value and not to even bother looking in detail at what he actually said.

"We swear by the Almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you
until you leave us alone. The only reason we have killed this man this
is because Muslims are dying daily. This British soldier is an eye for
an eye a tooth for a tooth ... We must fight them as they fight us. An
eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth...I apologise that women had to see
this today but in our lands our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your governments. They
don't care about you. Do you think David Cameron is gonna get caught in
the street when we start busting our guns? Do you think the politicians
are gonna die? No, it's gonna be the average guy – like you, and your
children. So get rid of them. Tell them to bring our troops back so you
can all live in peace. Leave our lands and you will live in peace.
That’s all I have to say. Allah’s peace and blessings be upon you.
Salaam alaikum".

Milne completely discounts the
nature of the threat was aimed at the British public, that if 'You
people' failed to stop the war then 'You' would become next. The fact it
was a soldier who was targeted was intended to give Adebolajo a sort of
equivalent status as a foot soldier in a war.

'Rigby
was a British soldier who had taken part in multiple combat operations
in Afghanistan. So the attack wasn't terrorism in the normal sense of an
indiscriminate attack on civilians'.

It was a
discriminate attack on a soldier that was meant to get the public to
think that they would be next because they have not prevented a war in
Afghanistan being fought. Adebolajo was not even a born Muslim nor from Muslim lands ;attacked' but
someone who converted in order to have a creed to fight for.

In
that sense, Adebolajo's actions are quite in line with a tradition of
political terrorism and assassination that has a pedigree going back to
the Russian tradition that culminated in Lenin's bloodthirsty use of
mass terror during the construction of the Soviet Union.

The idea
that there are no innocent people in this world once the scale of the
oppression is so clear means that either people are either for the right
cause or against it. By failing to 'do' anything to change governments
that carry out oppression in their name they are objectively supporting
it and targets.

To mechanically write off all consideration of
the psychopathology behind acts of terror and assassinations and
killings for political and religions reasons is the gambit of those who
have no problem with the idea of murdering their opponents so long as it
gets the result they want.

If that means using outrages and
atrocities for bolstering one's own propaganda, while affecting a
distaste for that killing as 'counter productive', then that's simply
the way it has to be in order to wake people up to the killing done in
'our name'. Sp Milne, as a prominent figure in the Stop the War Coalition claims,

'Only the wilfully blind or ignorant
can be shocked when there is blowback from that onslaught at home. The
surprise should be that there haven't been more such atrocities.'

'You
People' had it coming in other words. The position is Stop the War or else expect more
bloodshed. This is far from being a pacifist position. But then again,
one problem with the 'anti-war' groups in Britain is that they are not
led by well meaning people but, alas, cold blooded totalitarian
ideologues.

Monday, 16 December 2013

"You have to remember that Afghanistan is an extremely poor country
with a very, very troubled history but I think the purpose of our
mission was always to build an Afghanistan and Afghan security forces
that were capable of maintaining a basic level of security so this
country never again became a haven for terrorist training camps. That
has been the most important part of the mission …That is the mission, that was the mission and I think we will have
accomplished that mission and so our troops can be very proud of what
they have done."

"Afghanistanisation" is
a longer term project that underlies the geopolitical strategy of
ensuring that Iran is excluded from being able to export its gas
eastwards through Pakistan into India, one of the world's largest
markets. Thousands of Western troops and private contractors will remain after 2014.

With
British troops being withdrawn from 'combat roles'. the military and
private contractors are set to stay there in order to keep the Taliban
in check from attacking the TAPI pipeline's construction because this
has remained the paramount interest as the idea of 'nation building' was
shelved.

The process of 'drawdown' of British troops has been
paralleled by the US. Replaced by private contractors and with the
conflict spilling over to the south in Pakistan with drone warfare, the
strategy is to keep on with 'infrastructure projects' and the pipeline
that is in the West's vital interest to protect.

The importance
of the TAPI pipeline lies in the strategy of energy diversification. It
means Turkmen gas could be exported south beyond Russian control,
preventing China exerting too much leverage ( a pipeline now goes
between Turkmenistan and China ) and hemming in Iranian influence.

Opponents
of the war can scoff at Cameron's claim of 'mission accomplished'
because they are in the dark as to what the true objectives were. Even
if the war initially really did have women's liberation, the establishment
of liberal democracy and the 'war on drugs' as aims, these are now less
prominent.

The reality is that Afghanistan has always been an
important part of a geopolitical jigsaw and valued as a potential prize
for its copious resources, expecially of lithium ( used to make
batteries for everything from the mobile phones to iPads that consumers
demand ).

Afghanistan is a conflict zone and a cockpit in the New
Great Game for control of energy flows and the minerals needed for high
tech products being played out between the West, China and Russia. The
facts are established on this. US State Department officials routinely
mention 'the New Silk Road'.

If we are going to talk about
whether it 'was worth it', it's first necessary to understand why
Afghanistan was fought for so long. It's infantile to berate 'idiot
politicians' because the politicians know they could never admit the
real geopolitical reasons for the war that are too complex for the children to grasp.

Total Pageviews

About the Blog

This blog is mostly about the New Great Game for resources across the globe, the impact of oil and gas dependency upon both Britain and the oil rich nations, the purported interconnections between foreign policy and terrorism, the growth of Islamism and the mendacious nature of much 'Public Diplomacy'. It also seeks to anticipate the forthcoming threats to world peace by discerning the true nature of the new emerging psychopathologies that come with the struggle over diminishing natural resources, global warming, proxy conflicts and the prospect of civilisational collapse in regions such as the Middle East, Central Africa and the Maghreb.